Barbara Kay: Niagara’s school board of dunces needs an education in life

In one of those classic, coffee-spewing moments this morning, I read with incredulity in the National Post that the District School Board of Niagara plans to open the DSBN Academy, “a public school just for students whose parents don’t have a university or college education and are defined as low-income.” Don’t we already have a whole bunch of examples of such public schools in underprivileged areas? Schools in districts where nobody but a low-income, under-educated family would choose to live? Aren’t these exactly the places where parents are fighting like mad to get a voucher for a charter school so their kids don’t have to stay there?

What is the reasoning here? I understand, and approve of publicly-funded schools for children with immutable differences from others, like schools for the deaf or for those with very special remedial or cognitive needs. I understand – and disapprove of – publicly-funded schools for students with immutable cultural differences, like aboriginal or African-American children.

But there is nothing immutable in the essential composition of children from low-income homes, nor is the absence of a parent’s higher education qualifiable as an influence on the child’s life. My grandparents came to this country from a poor village in Poland. They lived in poverty here, but raised nine children, one of whom went to university on a scholarship. The others couldn’t afford to go. My father was the youngest of those nine children. He had to drop out of high school to help his father sell junk in a horse-drawn cart, just like in the movie, Lies My Father Told Me. My mother finished high school, but had to earn her own living, so she became a secretary.

So theoretically I would be one of those students eligible for the DSBN Academy. I can’t think of a worse fate. I happened to go to an excellent public school, because my father had by then made enough money for us to live in a good neighbourhood. But even if we had lived in a low-income area, as many other people from my culture did, we would have gone on to higher education.

It’s about the culture, not the income. I once read a peer-reviewed study of what immigrant groups succeed educationally. I don’t need to tell you who they are. In every case, they succeeded because their poor, uneducated parents knew that a higher education was the key to prosperity and security and respectability in society. The study noted the curious and very specific statistical probability that whether a Korean child is put in a lousy public school or a good public school or a private school, whether he or she is with other Korean children or all alone, that child is highly likely to go on to higher education and succeed in life. Most of those Korean children’s parents have no higher education themselves.

Only social theorists living in ivory towers and labouring under the Marxist delusion that poverty and lack of success are causally linked to capitalism and a conspiracy to keep them ignorant and enchained could come up with such a stupid idea. What low-income children need most in their lives is ambition, inspiration and encouragement. They need parents who push them to achieve, not bureaucrats who absolve parents from their jobs and make their children wards of the state. This scheme is more than stupid. It is a slap in the face to all people who came up by their own bootstraps, or who worked their fingers to the bone to ensure that if they themselves couldn’t have a higher education and a secure future, at least their children would. It wasn’t the state’s public schools that made successful Canadians who started out in poverty: It was self-respect, civic pride and a profound sense of responsibility toward their children. They did it for themselves. Now we have a school board essentially waving off the qualities of character and parental sacrifices that pulled children out of impoverishment and gave them the tools to enrich themselves.

I know a young woman who teaches school in a low-income area of Ontario – no point in being more specific than that – and she told me about the difficulties of dealing with low ambitions and low discipline. I asked her what she tells the parents when they come for their parent-teacher interviews. She laughed. She said none of the parents of her kids ever show up for them. There’s your problem. A special school won’t help children whose parents won’t help them.